It turns out a larger budget and better writing was the real trick to making this movie work

After disliking the first one, I went into this one very skeptical. It turns out you can do a bunch with 200x the budget.

The characters were more fleshed out, there was some (passable) lore, and things built up in a much more satisfying way. I definitely liked this movie.

The writing even was able to make a number of plot/motivation issues I had with the first one less problematic.

The major problem with this movie is that a lot of it requires you having seen the first movie to be enjoyable. 1 is not good enough to recommend on its own and I can't argue that someone should sit through it just to see this. Perhaps 3 will make me change my mind.